After
the razzmatazz of Christmas with its clear rituals of trees and tinsel,
stockings and turkey, my son asked me on Dec 31st what the rituals
were for this “New Year event thing.” I told him about staying up till midnight
and he was distinctly underwhelmed, so I went on to talk about resolutions,
about people giving up unwanted habits for the coming year. In the process I
realised that since I became a mother making emphatic resolutions is the habit
I have given up.

I
no longer like the idea of New Year resolutions for two reasons. Firstly it
implies that change happens overnight, literally, from Dec 31st to
Jan 1st.

In my experience lasting change
happens slowly, over many days and nights, or if it comes in a rush it is only
because it has been brewing for months beforehand. The kind of transformation
that happens fast is rarely trustworthy. Ask Cinderella and she’ll tell you how
all your sparkling coaches may turn back to pumpkins on the stroke of midnight,
not even lasting until the new morning. Linked
to the question of how lasting is the change, is the other problem I have with
the idea of setting resolutions: within the concept lies the potential, even
the expectation of failure. To me there is a hard-edge-ness to the idea of
resolving something, a macho quality of gritting teeth, pushing through. Can
you hold your resolve? What is your level of endurance? The implicit danger is
that you may succumb, you may weaken - words sometimes pejoratively gendered female.

So
what is the alternative? I prefer the idea of inviting change, not overnight,
but over 365 nights or more. Such a concept comes directly from my experience of
motherhood. At no point in my mothering journey have I felt the role to be a passive
one – not in pregnancy, certainly not in labour, and never beyond, and yet I
did not make my children. I have been instrumental to their growth and their
survival but I cannot take full artistic credit for them. It is the same with
any significant changes that I have undergone – I was instrumental to them
happening but I did not ‘do’ the change. I did not resolve it. Rather it turned
up. Like my children, it arrived. And once such an arrival has come about there
is no need for any grit-teethed resolve to keep it in place – it is an
irreversible presence.

So
here are my questions for you as January begins: what change would you like to invite
into your mothering and/or your making this year? What change are you courting,
as if it were an old-fashioned lover? What wishes flirt with you? And, to take
the romance further, to consummate your dreams, what new forms might you
conceive? What might you birth in 2018? If it appeals, let these invitations
replace your resolutions.